Japanese social mobile company GREE (TYO:3632) has announced its FY11 financials for the 12 months ending June 30.
Net sales were ¥64.2 billion (around $794 million), up 82 percent compared up FY10.
Operating profit was ¥31.1 billion (around $385 million), up 59 percent year-on-year.
Net income was ¥18.2 billion (around $225 million), up 59 percent.
The majority of sales (85 percent) came from paid services and games on GREE's mobile social platform in Japan. Open to thirdparty developers, there are now 348 paid games and 123 freemium games available. The remainder of sales were from adverts.
Firm foundations
During the year, GREE bought US mobile social gaming network OpenFeint and now claims a total global user base of 123.6 million. Of these 26.4 million are on GREE's Japanese network, which funds the vast majority of its business.
It also announced it was standardising GREE with mig33, a mobile community in emerging countries such as South Africa and Indonesia, which has around 50 million users.
Breaking out its fourth quarter performance, net sales were ¥21 billion (around $261 million), up 93 percent compared to Q4 FY2010.
Net income was ¥5.7 billion (around $70 million), up 83 percent.
As the company pointed out, the fourth quarter saw the largest rate of growth and sales during FY2011.
Focus on China
In terms of future strategy, GREE is looking to its agreement with Chinese online company Tencent, which will see the Tencent Wireless Open Platform for Community integrated with the GREE platform for both feature phones and smartphones.
It's also kicked off a business and development alliance with game outsourcing company UltiZen, and is in the process of opening a local Chinese office in Beijing.
In addition, GREE has a deal with Korea's biggest operator SK telecom, which will see it gain a special section on its T Store.
High hopes
GREE plans to end FY2012 with 300 million users globally, of which 30 million will be in Japan. This feeds into ambitious growth targets. It predicts FY12 sales up as much as 55 percent to $1.1 billion and net income up as much as 55 percent to $350 million.
The company ended the year with cash and cash equivalents of ¥22.3 billion (around $275 million), down 4 percent compared to its total at the end of March 2011.
It generated ¥8.8 billion (around $109 million) from its operating activities during the fourth quarter.
[source: GREE IR (PDF)]
